A chess tournament! Are you excited now? What if I say the winner gets a gift basket with something cool in it, like chocolate, craft beers or cookies and tea, or all of the above?

Yeah, I thought you might like that!

Barring any major rescheduling, the tourney is set to be held on Saturday, the 29th of july, hopefully all in one day, but to be honest that's probably not going to happen!

Planning, discussion, and casual practice games will be done in this thread, or in my discord group, if you wanna do it there. I'm open to that.https://discord.gg/mjFPtUx

Technical formalities: - Game format is best of 3 - Tournament format is elimination with no second or third place prizes. - Once your best of 3 (or other number of games, if you drew a couple of times) is concluded, send the results (who won), along with the logs of your games to me. - the easiest way to get quick logs is to use lichess.org for your games and copy paste the invitation link at me after the game is concluded. - in order to start a lichess game, go to the main site (preferably create an account) and select the play with friends option on the right hand side of the screen. You'll get a link that you can send to your opponent. - if you can't show up to play, or don't manage to conclude your games, try to reschedule to a different day. If rescheduling is not possible, you will have to forfeit your spot and will be removed from the tournament bracket post haste!

If it takes many days to finish this tourney so be it. We're in no rush c:

IMPORTANT:: To join the tourney, submit your name and wish to join in this thread or in the appropriately named section of the Discord group. Submissions close on friday 8pm GMT, after which I will compile a tournament bracket and post it in a new thread. Games will then take place whenever players have the time, but preferably as fast as possible. I'll leave it to you guys to set up the games themselves! Hopefully that's not a mistake on my part.

I will also be posting a mirror of this thread on Ponychan, to draw in more players. I think that's all. Let's have some fun with this! Remember, it's a beginners tournament, so even if you suck, you could make it pretty far, and you might learn a few things when Astra eventually crushes you in the semifinals!

>>550200Oddly I like the community spirit which is much stronger here than it generally is in the north. It almost feels like everyone is on a big sports team; though I'm not particularly sociable in that way, there is something comforting about the feeling of solidarity and that people aren't always thinking in terms of "show me the money". There's a downside to this as well which I won't go into. I also like the city and its unique history and character.

>>551294- the easiest way to get quick logs is to use lichess.org for your games and copy paste the invitation link at me after the game is concluded.- in order to start a lichess game, go to the main site (preferably create an account) and select the play with friends option on the right hand side of the screen. You'll get a link that you can send to your opponent.

We've still got a few games we need to play, guys. Find your opponents. Think of it as a hide and seek minigame but were both players are trying to find each other (unless one of them thinks they're going to loose if they find the other)

>>552196I spent the first four hours of my morning yesterday waiting for you to respond that you were ready (and typing a new chapter while I waited). I'm into my work week now, though. I think we should set a time and just meet up. I'm UTC+9, so how does 0900 UTC July 31st sound?

>>552265UTC is a universally consistent time zone, based on the prime meridian, which just happens to be the same as GMT. Knowing your UTC offset is important for coordinating across time zones. My UTC offset is +9, meaning I am 9 hours ahead of UTC. it will be the same for GMT.

>>557476I've been trying to message Zeke on skype and discord, was just about to send another one. If the worst happens and I can't get a hold of him I'll count his best of three with Chrome as a loss.

>>554775>>558236Wait, I'm confused. Did you guys play a best of five? You know the tournament format was best of 3 right :p. Anyway, good games, Chrome you were really crushing it in a few of these! Thanks for playing with us, Zeke, it was nice to have you over ^_^

I'm sorry for not checking up on the thread earlier, btw, work has been a KNIGHTmare. Idk, that's not a good joke, lol.

Anyway, for the rest of you here's the updated bracket for round 2 (and I'm not in it ;__;) Good luck have fun, guys.

>>558732You should just take your time to think about your moves in the next round! Imagine a position in your head, and try to know every one of your opponents moves. If you can do that, you'll find it very hard to get stalemated in a winning position.

>>558743Kinda comes from my time with multiplayer games in general. I tend to notice that a prevailing attitude of defeatism people seem to have going into games. Or rather, the moment things start to not go their way they just give up and throw. Whereas my thought process is that if I'm going to lose no matter what I do, I'm still going to make a fight out of it.

>>558748When you moved your king in further and away from its escape route. I had my rook there so to put your king in check, then you'd have to move it up a space, exposing your queen, then I'd queen my pawn… basically I was positioning to take your queen, not checkmate. Just a brain fart?

>>559188It's funny. I was thinking about how when you play someone in person they sometimes groan or blurt something out when they make a mistake, drawing attention to the fact that they made an error in calculation, and how one of the great benefits of playing online is that you don't have to worry about such slip-ups. Well, today I have proven myself wrong!

I've been on vacation off the grid. I'm back now. I should have mentioned I was going but I didn't know it'd be so removed and that I'd be so busy. Only one game left before we can determine a winner and get them the prize ^_^

>>563637 I just went back and looked. I'm not sure I see the problem you're wondering about. I wanted to open the back row and have an extra option against your d pawn. Also there wasn't any danger of being put in check aside from the pawn that I was moving to block.

>>563652 actually I think the bigger mistake was Qc3. I've been replaying it from there against 1600 level AI and I lose more often than I win. or maybe I'm just too tired and rushed against AI.https://lichess.org/y2kG8jaE